BART talks resume at 10 a.m. today, but Monday strike possible

Published By Times Herald

OAKLAND - BART trains will keep rolling - for now - after the commuter line and its unions reached a deal Thursday night to extend contract talks for another three days.

Union leaders told their members to report to work Friday but warned that a new deadline to avert a strike loomed for Sunday night. They provided a formal 72-hour notice of a strike for Monday morning without a deal before then.

The 60-day cooling-off period ordered by Gov. Jerry Brown was set to expire at 11:59 p.m. on Thursday and the unions had refused to say whether they would go on strike this morning without a deal. Just 15 minutes before that deadline, the unions read a statement announcing they would stay on the job for a few more days.

The unions said they were encouraged that elected legislative leaders and BART directors were getting involved in the talks and that General Manager Grace Crunican was set to arrive at the bargaining table this morning after she previously delegated negotiating duties to others.

"The unions are continuing to negotiate and (we) hope to avoid a strike," said Roxanne Sanchez, president of the local Service Employees International Union.

Talks were set to resume 10 a.m. today.

The temporary truce postpones a battle that has already been raging for six months and has resulted in one rail shutdown, two more threatened strikes and plenty of anxiety for Bay Area commuters. It's unclear how much closer to a deal the two sides are, as they had abided by a gag order suggested by mediators.

BART had not actually presented a new offer to the unions Thursday night, several hours after announcing one was forthcoming.

"We will see what happens when we actually get an offer," said Antonette Bryant, president of the local Amalgamated Transit Union, said earlier.

Another union bargaining committee member, Chris Finn, said: "We haven't seen any movement from the BART board of directors. There are still a number of issues outstanding, but this could be resolved very quickly."

BART's board of directors, which would need to approve a new labor contract, postponed a special evening board meeting until 10 a.m. today because there was no deal to be voted on early in the evening.

On Thursday morning, at the regularly scheduled board meeting, union members blasted agency leaders as they have time and again. The BART directors then met in closed session before telling chief negotiator Thomas Hock to submit a new proposal.

Starting this week, at the suggestion of mediators, both sides agreed to a blackout on the contents of the latest proposals as they continued to fight over wage increases and other issues. Still, the union's chief negotiator said both sides were now about $16 million apart - or half the figure the workers quoted last week.

Another all-day negotiation session ended on a sour note Wednesday night when the two unions representing 2,300 blue-collar workers issued a statement indicating they were close to a deal before management "pulled the rug from underneath" them by taking back a recent offer.

BART denied that and blamed it on a miscommunication.

"We were this close," Bryant said while holding her fingers a tiny bit apart, "and the bottom fell out."

Josie Mooney, the chief negotiator for the other labor group - the local Service Employees International Union - said, "We were literally stunned."

BART officials said they were trying to put the spat behind them and were focused on reaching a deal.

The average line-level employee at BART made $76,500 in gross pay last year, the most of any transit agency in the state. Workers do not contribute toward their pensions and pay $92 a month toward health care regardless of how many dependents they have.

Workers have agreed to pay more toward their benefits but say they deserve a raise because they have not received a meaningful pay increase in more than four years, even as BART's rider and tax revenues have soared to record levels. But management says its needs to keep employee costs under control as it tries to buy rail cars and make billions of dollars of upgrades to expand service and keep the 40-year-old system running adequately.

A BART proposal made public late last week offered 10.25 percent in pay increases and pension contributions of 4 percent over four years. The two unions had countered with the equivalent of 18.4 percent pay increases. The gap between the proposals amounted to about $1,500 in pay increases per year for the average union employee.

Polls have repeatedly shown the public disapproves of a strike and favors management's latest offer. A SurveyUSA poll commissioned by KPIX, which was released Wednesday, showed that among respondents who were keeping up with the negotiations, 54 percent said the unions should accept BART's offer. Just 16 percent thought management should cave. Twenty-two percent wanted them to continue negotiating.

Negotiations began more than six months ago, on opening day of the Oakland A's season. Since then, the war of words and constant disagreement have frustrated Bay Area commuters and led to calls for state legislators to ban BART strikes.

The unions went on strike for 4 days in July and twice had threatened strikes in August averted by Brown. But no one outside the talks can step in to stop a strike now.

BART, which carries about 200,000 people round trip each day, sees its rider counts grow 30 percent in October compared with the summer. Even so, the July shutdown, which was the first since 1997, slowed freeways and bridges to a crawl and forced standing-room-only on buses and ferries.